Almost eight months ago we published Heads in the Sand. This story highlighted DuneCare’s need for help to quickly bolster the fore dune which, after protecting Wooli many times, was badly damaged by major storms in quick succession. Unfortunately, Clarence Valley Council (CVC) refused our request to use beach scraping even though this is a proven, inexpensive and widely used solution to this problem.

However, Council’s refusal was quickly shown to be a major error when shortly afterwards the (then) Environment Minister, Rob Stokes, strongly supported scraping in his speech to the NSW Coastal Conference. He followed this up by saying he would shortly write to the Council recommending and offering funding for beach scraping at Wooli.

So what’s the bad news in that you ask? Well, just before he wrote to CVC he was caught up in the recent reshuffle of the NSW Government and lost the Environment Portfolio. The major impacts on Wooli were:

a further six month delay in Ministerial approval of Wooli’s coastal management plan (CZMP) which aims to provide longer term protection of the beach.

Fortunately, the tide then started turning (pun intended) in Wooli’s favour when the new Environment Minister, Gabrielle Upton, was appointed.

CCPA quickly enlisted the help of Clarence MP, Chris Gulaptis, in arranging a meeting with her to go over these issues. Like Chris, our new CVC Mayor, Jim Simmons, also showed his support for Wooli by agreeing to a senior council manager, Des Schroder, joining us in attending the meeting thereby presenting a combined community and council view to Minister Upton.

So the Good News is, following the June 1st meeting, the Minister has taken two important steps:

She has written to CVC supporting beach scraping at Wooli without the need for either an approved CZMP or further environmental studies and with funding being immediately available and

Confirmed she would prioritise making a decision on whether or not to approve our CZMP. The Coastal Panel had earlier recommended against approving it until Council does several more studies (resulting in a major delay) while we and the council recommended approving it now, with any critical studies to be included in its first stage. We suspect the Minister’s decision may still be weeks away, hopefully not months.

After eight months of delays these steps make it feel like the force is with us again and Wooli’s future is being dug out of government limbo. Let’s leave our fingers crossed because the fore dune is still damaged, the storm season is still coming and the CZMP is not yet approved.

You might remember our article early this year thanking DuneCare for creating a healthy fore dune. The article also raised the concern that “..we are worried that the fore dunes that have been built up might be taken by a big storm and then it takes us 6 months to organise a beach scraping project (to repair it) – and there could be another storm in that time which could seriously damage the main dune.”

Well those two storms in June brought this fear very much to the fore as the fore dune lost about half its sand and the foot of the main dune was exposed in several places. As that article foreshadowed “..Based on very experienced independent advice, the CCPA steering committee has begun the next step of working with the Council to have a beach scraping plan pre-approved and pre-funded so as to be ready when it’s needed to quickly repair the fore dune.”

CCPA’s success in proactively working with Council to develop the CZMP (which includes scraping) provided an encouraging basis for this discussion.
But on the other hand, CCPA has been unsuccessfully promoting beach scraping (also known as Nature Assisted Beach Enhancement ) as a practical measure to mitigate risks at Wooli for a number of years.

The four barriers to NABE raised during these promotions are listed below, each followed by the independent –expert advice that CCPA has received.

Using NABE would weaken the CZMP case with State Depts. for using beach nourishment

NABE is a short term management technique to overcome erosion which can occur when multiple storms occur in a relatively short period. It is not in competition with beach nourishment and in fact is often used in conjunction with beach nourishment, as well as on its own.

There is insufficient evidence/studies proving the value of NABE

This is incorrect. There are many papers available demonstrating the value of beach scraping, some of which are summarised in the 2016 NSW Conference papers. The Engineers Australia 2013 Conference also had an extended seminar on the topic with a very large list of references.

Wooli beach is a net-loser of sand so the scraped sand would not be replaced

This is again incorrect. Whether a beach is or is not a net loser of sand it is where that sand is stored on the beach that is critical from the point of view of limiting main dune erosion. If some of the sand is stored in beach-scraped dunes then they form a buffer which can absorb some or all of the erosion before the main dune is exposed to direct attack. New Brighton is a classic example of this.

There are no funds available, even for a Pilot study, even if CCPA largely funded it

Even if CCPA pays there are no funds ? The logic eludes me. Besides, State grant funds are made available for community and council projects.

Unfortunately, our recent discussion with Council was only successful in identifying a fifth barrier, which is

that NABE is included in the CZMP and so can’t be used until the CZMP is approved by the Minister. Until then, NABE was considered to be outside the official CZMP process.

Many councils have been successfully using NABE for many decades without the need for a certified CZMP and so councils shouldn’t use the absence of a certified CZMP as an excuse for not undertaking NABE.

In the absence of community-led NABE , the official approach is firstly to encourage DuneCare to rebuild the fore dune (which of course they are) and secondly to wait until the CZMP process is complete. Optimistically this would mean NABE could not proceed until at least 2018 which is the earliest time in which the CZMP foresees the beach needing sand renourishment. The underpinning assumptions here are that the main dune survives this summer’s cyclone season (forecast to be worse than usual) as well as the 2017 winter storms.

The possible ray of sunshine is a rumour that the Minister may include his support for NABE in his presentation at November’s NSW Coastal Conference. Armed with that, CCPA will be approaching not only Council Officers but also our elected Councillors urging them to get behind the urgent repair work needed on Wooli’s dunes.

That’s when the ‘one step back’ happened. The CZMP proposed to get half the sand needed to nourish the village dunes from the national park behind Wilsons Headland. NSW National Parks department rejected that idea meaning the CZMP would not be approved.

Now for the two steps forward.

Firstly, Council are to be congratulated for promptly approving an adjustment to the plan which retainsbeach nourishmentto protect the dunes but uses a different approach to get the needed sand. The northern end of Wooli beach will continue to provide about half the sand originally planned for, but will do so every 2.5 years rather than every 5 years (depending on availability and need).

Secondly, Council added to the revised plan a proposal from CCPA to investigatebeach scrapingas a way to supplement the sand supply from north Wooli. Thanks to members Brian Saye (surveyor) and Bob Stack (engineer) for their Submissions which formed the basis for our proposal.

Finally, a couple of cautions about the Plan’s likely success. Agreement will be needed from the Departments of Land and Marine Parks to take sand from north Wooli before this revised CZMP is likely to be approved by the Minister. Also state government approval of Council’s funding application is needed in order to get the plan started. Guarded optimism would be a fair summary.

The title of this article is part of a recent quote from Brad Hazzard, NSW Minister for the Department of Planning and Infrastructure,

“The problem that property owners face is that some councils have been casting potential longer-term issues as a clear-and-present danger,” Mr Hazzard said. “We just need to get councils to jump away from that doomsday scenario.”

Minister Hazzard was quoted as part of a story in The Australian entitled “Climate Doomsday powers to be eroded”. This story highlights the State government’s revised planning directions to councils.

CCPA-Wooli members may recall from our last article,Backwards or Forwards, that Wyong Council has decided to follow State advice and “jump away from the doomsday scenario” in their coastal planning. Unfortunately, as you’ll see in that article Clarence Valley Council (CVC) continues to treat 86-year modelling forecasts as clear-and-present-danger in their Coastal Zone Management Plans, including the one for Wooli beach. Comparing the beach today to the dire forecast in this clipping from the Daily Examiner in 1997 indicates the difficulty of forecasting out even 17 years, much less 86.

Coastal Hotspot communities understand that coastal management is a complex problem for all our councils and one they are struggling to manage as highlighted in this recent report in the Byron Bay Echo (thanks to our CCPA member Ian Oelrichs for sending it in).

CCPA-Wooli is continuing to work with CVC, the relevant State government departments and the Hotspot community groups to pull together to find a balanced solution.

Coastal Zone Management Plans (CZMP ‘s) have been a can of worms for local councils and coastal communities alike.

Wooli ‘s 2010 draft CZMP presented by CVC used sea level rise predictions from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. These forecast rises of between 0.4m and 0.9m by 2100 and raised the spectre of â€œplanned retreatâ€ as a very real threat to much of Wooli ‘s property.

Since then, CCPA has worked doggedly to remove the â€œplanned retreatâ€ option from the draft Wooli CZMP.

So it was surprising to note an inclusion in the tender document recently released by CVC for consultants wishing to prepare a draft CZMP for Whiting Beach at Yamba. This inclusion instructs those tendering to use IPCC figures as a basis for their reports the very same figures that led to the confusion and insecurity that accompanied the appearance of the contentious â€œplanned retreatâ€ threat.

While we understand that the previous state government compelled local councils to use these figures back in 2010, it appears that CVC is reluctant to disregard them when drafting current CZMP ‘s, despite some convincing grounds for doubt informing the debate.

Available evidence raises legitimate arguments that counter these long-term worst-case projections. A 2004 CSIRO study, which was quoted by Worley Parsons ‘ report to the Great Lakes Council on the mid-north coast, states that actual sea level rise from 1920 to 2000 would have to accelerate by 400-900% this century to match IPCC forecasts. The extraordinary acceleration needed to achieve these rises was recently confirmed by Professor Michael Asten of the geophysics department at Monash University in an article applying an even longer view, averaging the actual rise from 1900 to 2010.

Further supporting the doubtful relevance of IPCC ‘s projections, the state government has, in a recently released draft planning circular, cautioned local councils about solely relying on IPCC figures, noting that â€œthe further into the future we seek to predict an outcome, the more uncertainty that is associated with the predictionâ€. They suggest instead that councils also employ site-specific data to inform coastal management plans.

Some councils are choosing a different approach over blind adherence to IPCC ‘s predictions. In Fighting on the Beaches (Jan 11-12 2014 The Australian), Wyong Shire Council Mayor, Doug Eaton, was reported as saying that councillors around the country are “terrorised” by the insurers, lawyers and local and state government bureaucrats to accept the IPCC predictions to reduce legal risk, and told they could bear personal liability if the council were sued. But Eaton says that, as a lawyer himself, he has carefully analysed the issues and decided the council would still have the defence that it had acted in good faith because the Labor-era requirement to rely on the IPCC guidelines had been scrapped. “We threw out the sea-level rise crap,” Eaton says.

Wyong Shire Council has instead adopted a previous flood management benchmark plus a free-board of 50cm to account for unspecified allowance for sea level rise if the issue was raised in court.

These issues are on the agenda for CCPA ‘s upcoming meetings with CVC to continue discussions on the next version of Wooli’s CZMP.

P.S Many thanks to Roger Welch for the pics in this article which he took in Solitary Islands Marine Park off Wooli.